I’m currently studying naming practices in 7 countries on a Watson Fellowship. I’m curious how names are defined both by the individuals who bear them and their cultural and historical contexts. The process of naming a child is shaped by considerations that include religious traditions, government restrictions, family history, and cultural icons. I'm interested in how names act as microcosms for societal questions of identity on an international scale.

Friday, August 31, 2012

Below you will find the final report I just completed for the Watson Foundation as well a few photos from the last quarter of my year. It's a good deal longer than the other quarterly reports I've written this year, so brace yourself.

I think this report will serve as the bittersweet ending to this blog. I have enjoyed sharing stories and photos with you all so much, that I doubt it will be the last time I keep a blog, but I think it's the end of Names Across Nations. I will, of course, post here and let you know if I continue on my research on names in a different medium, or blog about my life in general somewhere else. If you're finding this blog after its completion and have questions about the Watson Fellowship, or suggestions, comments, or ideas about research on names, you can always send me an e-mail at nell.a.bangjensen@gmail.com.

It is sad for me to say goodbye here because I have been so very grateful for the support and encouragement of my readers. Despite the complaints about the overwhelmingly tech-heavy world we live in, having a way to communicate with the people I care about (as well as strangers-turned-friends who stumbled upon this), was not only a gift but a necessity on such an independent year. You all have been the most supportive, thought-provoking, and dedicated readers that I could have hoped for. Thanks to this blog, I was able to be connected to a couple at a Pastor Training College in Zambia who invited me into their home, and I was able to be connected to my grandparents in Massachusetts, who read my entries aloud to each other.

It's been such a gift to share this journey with you all. As you'll read in my final report, I've been saying a lot of these lately, but seriously, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

With love,
Nell

Currently on display in my backyard (Thank you, Uncle Per).

September 1, 2012

To the Watson Fellowship Office,

It is
so lovely to be writing to you now that I can finally envision who will be reading
it on the other end.Hello from
Burlington, Vermont, where, after a month of trips to see friends and attend weddings,
a family vacation in Prince Edward Island, and of course, the fleeting and
somewhat magical Watson conference, I am finally settling back home. Some things
are taking longer to adapt to than others. Having two people who willingly feed
me and don’t charge me rent has been an easy adjustment; overwhelming American
grocery stores and the size of my closet, not so much.I’m also getting used to being here without
my family’s beloved dog, Cally, who died while I was on the last few days of my
Watson year.

The places
where I sat down to write my other quarterly reports (Hyderabad, India,
Copenhagen, Denmark, and Dublin, Ireland), feel a far cry from my parents’
couch. When I last wrote one of these
(what feels like ages ago), I had just begun my time in project country #6:
Ireland. Soon after I wrote, I moved to
Belfast where I lived with a wonderful woman, Tricia, and her seven year-old
daughter, Gaby, and spent four weeks looking into the role names play in
religious conflict there. Tricia works at the WAVE Trauma Center in downtown
Belfast, a cross-community care organization that offers support to people who
have been bereaved, injured or traumatized as a result of the Troubles. Her students at WAVE, who were from Protestant
and Catholic families, were a great resource for me. Several of them had stories from their
childhoods about casual name changes they would undergo on a daily basis at
their parents’ encouragement. A boy named Terrance, for example, went by the
more Protestant-sounding name of “Billy” when walking to school through certain
neighborhoods in order to avoid trouble. It was distressing to learn about Belfast’s
recent history especially because it happenedin a place that, in some ways, felt so much like home.

I used
my rainy days in Belfast to meet with professors at Queen’s University about
these questions and even had the opportunity to meet with one of my favorite all-time
poets, Medbh McGuckian, and talk to her about names. I was continually
surprised by the role names play in the Irish tourism industry as well. I met
with several historians who explained that because of the remarkable size of
the Irish diaspora, tracing names and researching genealogy are large draws for
many visitors and present commercial opportunities.I used
my sunny days there to go hiking and bouldering with Tricia and Gaby. Being in
the mountains made me feel the closest to home that I had been all year.I used Gaby as an excuse to explore the city
and participate in kid-centered events like the outdoor Festival of Fools and visiting
the new Titanic museum.In exchange,
Gaby gave me the title of “adopted sister” on day one and filled me in on all
the Lady Gaga songs I had been missing for the last nine months outside of the
United States. She was surprised (and perhaps slightly disappointed) to learn
that I didn’t speak exactly like the American teenagers she watched on the
Disney Channel.

I spent my last few weeks in
Ireland in the western part of the country. Galway felt the most stereotypically
“Irish” of any place I’d been to so far, and I took in the great music,
friendly populace, beautiful language and seaside. A highlight was meeting with
members of the Irish Traveling community while I was there. They told me about
their own naming traditions, and how Travelers have specific surnames that are
passed on and have become a basis for discrimination.They also told me that the custom of passing
on first names in families was so common a practice within their community that
they have an expression for it: getting “titled.” The
stability that “getting titled” provided in uniting generations seemed
especially important when in the midst of a fluid lifestyle.Interestingly, they told me that “Nell” was a
common Traveler name, and they had never met a settled person who wore it
before.

On June 5th, I took a
short flight to Reykjavik and began to make a home for myself in what would be
my last country of the year. I was rendered speechless by Iceland’s sheer beauty
and between the gorgeous weather, colorful houses and remarkably safe streets,
I found it to be one of the easiest places to be a traveler that I’d been to
thus far.It’s also a great place to
study names. Similar to what I found in Germany, names in Iceland are governmentally regulated. An
official Naming Committee approves the
names of all babies born in Iceland and follows strict rules about how names are
conjugated to fit with the grammar of the language. Names are also regulated
based on gender of the child, spelling, and meaning.

Because I had plenty of time in
Reykjavik and language wasn’t a challenge, I was able to meet with a wide
variety of people about the topic. From Guðrún Kvaran, the former chair of the
Icelandic Naming committee, to Pastor Sigurður Árni Þórðarson, a priest who
baptizes babies and is figuring out his own personal and legal responsibility
in terms of the names he baptizes them with, to young parents I met through
friends. Some of my most interesting conversations were with immigrants to
Iceland who were trying to make a place for themselves in a homogeneous place.
Before 1996, immigrants were required to change their names to Icelandic ones
in order to gain citizenship. Even today, babies born in Iceland must have
Icelandic names regardless of where their parents are from. As you can imagine,
with increasing numbers of immigrants to Iceland, it’s a controversial policy.

It would be a waste to be in
Iceland without sampling some of its magnificent landscapes, so in addition to
my research, I did my fair share of traipsing around volcanoes and glaciers,
never quite believing my eyes. I spent the two months I was there trying to
work on my knitting skills like the rest of the population, and trying to
adjust to the disorienting 24-hours of sunlight. I was also the lucky to meet Sarah
Brownsberger, a poet and Watson Fellow of the class of 1981 who was currently
living in Iceland and who invited me over because, as she put it, “you should
always feed a Watson.”

The last month in my Watson year
was, counter-intuitively, one of my hardest. Because, on the grand timeline of the year I
was so close to home, it felt hard to be forming new relationships I knew would
soon end.Constantly investing in new
places and new people felt more exhausting than it had before. My emotions
seemed to swing wildly between aching for home, feeling like I needed to take
advantage of everything while I still could, and already anticipating the loss
that this year’s end would be.The last
three months of my year was the only chunk of time that was spent exclusively
in Europe, and the slightly more familiar systems and foods made me feel much
closer to home (psychologically and geographically), than I had been up to that
point. Because issues of personal safety and health were less at the forefront
of my mind than they may have been in other places, in some ways, it was harder
to keep my mind busy and not worry about what I’d face when I got home. Finally,
on July 27th, the date I had occasionally counted down to but never believed
would actually come, I flew home.

In retrospect, my first few days
home in Vermont between when I arrived back in the states and attended the Watson
conference were spent in a bit of a haze. I kept myself busy stuffing old clothes
into bags for Goodwill, while rapidly trying to hang onto the “Watson year
self” I had developed; one that was slipping away at an alarming rate now that
I was back in my adolescent bedroom. The conference provided some much needed
closure, a refreshing reassurance that this experience would forever be a part
of my life, and the chance to be surrounded by some of the most interesting,
kind, and passionate people I had ever met. Above all, I was so profoundly
humbled to be in their company.

As evidenced by the fact that I still
can’t get through more than thirty seconds of the Watson conference video
without tears running down my face, the experience is still quite raw. I can’t
really believe I’ve already been back in the states for over four weeks now. I am just beginning to process what a gift
this was, how, perhaps in ways that are only obvious to me, it has rattled,
shaked, and transformed me to the core. Burlington, Vermont feels, in some ways, like
an entirely different city than the one I left, but I think it might just be
me.

I will admit that writing this
final report was somewhat of a struggle for me. On some subconscious level I
knew that once I wrote it I’d be closing the book of this year, even though, as
many people reassured us at the conference, the Watson experience will be a
lens through which I look at the world for the rest of my life. Beyond this fear of letting go, however, was
also the knowledge that I’d never be able to adequately express all I had to
say to the Watson Foundation. How exactly do you thank someone for giving you
an experience that most people never have in their lifetimes? For having the
trust to give me some a generous sum of money and such enormous freedom? To
have supported and encouraged me so very much along the way? There is a sense
of guilt that comes with having this experience at 23, one that others only
dream of, and also from being in so many places where people have so few of the
opportunities, and even basic living conditions that I take for granted.Life can be profoundly unfair sometimes.

Only when sitting down to write
this did the irony dawn on me that this was a challenge I faced all year
long.When strings of old Indian women
would hand me coconut after coconut to drink, when a stranger in Berlin said I
could live with her for a month, free of charge, when people welcomed me into
their homes and offices and market stalls with open arms to talk to me about
their names, and in doing so, about what they held dear. I faced this challenge
over and over again. I feel I’ll never quite deserve all of the incredible
goodness the world has offered me, but time and time again as I left each
place, I learned to accept it, with open arms right back. To smile and say
“thank you”and make a mental note to
pay it forward somewhere, somehow, and accept that giving is a gift too.This year has left me feeling deeply indebted
to the world, and guilt aside, I’m thinking this might not be a bad way to go
about my life in it.

In some ways, it was a year of
discomfort. My first night back in the U.S., climbing into my bed, it was as if
a physical weight had completely dropped off my chest. I hadn’t even realized
I’d been carrying around this weight of responsibility, of being slightly on
edge all year, until it had evaporated.I came face to face with many realities that I hadn’t come to terms with
before, and it took being there to realize my own power to do so. Things that I
would never have done voluntarily arose out of necessity, and I recognized that
they were within me all along. I found the language to console a man after his
father had died.I rode on the backs of
motorcycles because that was simply how I needed to get around. I went to
dinner parties where no one spoke my language and I laughed when everybody else
laughed and nodded as if I understood.I
learned to elbow my way to the front of lines, to deal with taunts and stares, when
to cheat the system to get a visa extension, when to go to a clinic.I learned how much I loved to be alone. I
learned that relationships were worth having, even when you had to walk away
from them too soon. I learned to feel patriotic about where I came from. I
learned to give myself structure in an unstructured world; to redefine
productivity, the true meaning of independence.

Words were a theme for me this
year. As I studied names and their meanings, and got wrapped up in informal
interviews and conversations, these thoughts would swim around in my brain
until I would go home and write about them. I feel like I rediscovered myself
as a writer while simultaneously realizing I could find a common language
without words. I learned many new languages this year; not just bits of
Indonesian and Moroccan Arabic and Icelandic, but also more metaphorical
languages. I learned the complicated language of travelers discussing options
for malarial pills, and the language of aggressive bargaining in market stalls
and medinas. And most of all, the
meaning of names.

I loved my research. I’m proud of
some of the writing that came out of it. I’m not sure if I’ll try to continue
on my exploration of names in a formal way or not, but I might, because I think
what I found was interesting and unusual, and, at the heart of it, so very
human. I loved hearing stories. I loved seeing the light in people’s eyes when
they told me about how they named their children. I loved making people feel
like what they had to say about it was worth telling and worth being listened
to.I loved the family stories passed
on, the cultural traditions, the strings of syllables that formed the sounds
they called each other by and that somehow, regardless of literal meaning,
always meant love.

When people ask me how this year
was, the most honest response I have yet to come up with is “full.” Every
moment of sadness felt miserable, every moment of happiness was exuberant. I was laughing with some fellow Watsons at the
conference that at times it seemed like our emotional lives were akin to those
of an extremely hormonal pregnant woman. I would cry or laugh all the time,
seemingly for no reason. When the simple task of finding & buying a new
bottle of shampoo is overwhelmingly difficult, the successes are all the more
powerful.

I’m hesitant to talk about the idea of being
full because “living life fully” is such a cliché at this point. But the
definitions I created for myself of living a full life this year were
complicated and deliberate. It wasn’t just about saying yes more than I said no
(though that was certainly a part of it), but also about addressing things head
on. A full life is one that is full of discomfort and extremes as much as it is
about seizing the day.It’s about being
mindful and sitting with uncertainty but also about being unafraid to talk
openly about race and gender and politics and religion, even if you’re scared
you might not have the adequate language to do so.

And perhaps because I had the
knowledge that I was living a full life, somehow the extremes of emotions
created a kind of balance; discomfort turned into comfort.I
wrote in my last report about the invincibility that arose in realizing I could
land anywhere, and be just fine, (metaphorically or physically). This year I
learned to create a kind of sustainable happiness. This is not to say that I
didn’t have bad days, but that I knew I could create for myself a life that was
worth living and that I was holding on to fiercely and gratefully. Maybe I would have arrived at this point, so
free of anxiety, so full of wonder about the world, the people in it, and
myself, at some point in my life, but the Watson gave me the gift of reaching
this peak while I still have a lot left of it to live. I’ve learned to listen
to myself, to figure out what defines me, even (or especially) when everything
around me is changing. I’ve learned my contributions
are worthwhile, my head and my heart are full, and I can belong anywhere and
everywhere.

My parents are amazed that I am
home, with no plans set, and stress-free. I have the confidence that when I
need to move onto the next thing, whatever it may be, I will.I know that whatever decision I make about
what to do next, I will somehow turn it into the right decision, at least temporarily,
because that’s just how we keep moving through our lives day after day. There is an immense feeling of liberation that
comes from seeing that there are so many different ways to live a life in this
world. You realize you can’t really get it wrong.

For now I’ll keep writing,
haphazardly applying to jobs in east coast cities that look interesting,
enjoying the beginning signs of fall in Vermont, and replaying the Watson video
until I’m ready to move on. I know my journey is not over. I know that these experiences will, somehow,
keep unfolding and surprising me. Sometimes the year feels like a dream, or something
that happened in another lifetime. At other moments things come back to me so
strongly; the taste of a Balinese coconut pancake, the hot beads of sweat on my
forehead in a forest in Kerala, the lights of the Berlinale film festival.I am savoring these memories, knowing they’ve
somehow transformed me into a person who is in and of this world. I’m not sure
how this year will continue to affect and transform me, only that it will
inevitably continue to do so. As to what I’ll answer when people ask me what I’ll
do with this experience, I’ll quote a favorite author, Cheryl Strayed, who once
said to respond to questions such as these by saying, “Carry it with me, as I do everything that
matters.”

It’s mattered quite a lot.

Thank
you for everything.

Nell

Photos:
-City Hall & Downtown Belfast
-At the top of Cave Hill, Belfast
-Cave Hill, with Gaby and Jack the dog (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
-Saying goodbye to my new Irish family; with Tricia & Gaby in Belfast
-Seaside & Houses in Galway, Ireland
-Cows in Connemara, Ireland
-Downtown Reykjavik (arrival in my last country!)
-In Reykjavik next to a wall of Icelandic names!
-In my backyard at MIDNIGHT in Reykjavik (please note how amazingly light it is outside AND my new Icelandic sweater).

Monday, August 13, 2012

Greetings from PEI, Canada, where I've spent a sliver of every summer since I was five.

I just realized I never posted a
12-month Watsoversary. There was a lot going on.

During
my 11th and 12th months abroad, I saw a free outdoor
performance of Of Monsters and Men. I
picked lupines on the side of the highway and figured out the Reykjavik bus
system. I ate roast lamb at the homes of two different Icelandic families, I
met with the former chair of the national naming committee. I stayed out until 5am and
discovered eerily sunlit nightlife, went to a gallery opening, rode Icelandic
horses. I received an Icelandic sweater (lopapeysa) as a gift and interviewed
Iceland’s first female priest. I visited a summer home in
Thingvellir that was full of red wine and patriotic singalongs. I visited the Blue Lagoon, tried (and gagged
on) rotten shark, said my goodbyes. I came home.

I’m now
somewhere between month 12 and month 13, because, as we learned/realized at the
Watson conference last week, your Watson begins when you start applying and you’re
on it for the rest of your life. The only difference is that after a year, the
money runs out.

The
returning fellows conference in Wisconsin made for some of the most wonderfully
intense days of my life. I was humbled to be in the company of such smart
and innovative people; so caught up in the warmth and kindness that emanated
from every room I walked into. Between the forty of us, we covered seventy-one
countries this year. Since the founding of the fellowship in 1968, there have
been over 2700 Watson fellows--we are now in their midst.I got to see some of the faces behind the
foundation, learn more about how the fellowship works, and hear about Thomas
J. Watson, Sr. himself. I met many former
Watson fellows and listened to how this experience has continued to affect them
(some in more direct ways than others) throughout their lives.

I was deeply honored to be in the company of such incredible people.

This is the ONE photo I remembered to take during the conference...right before the opening cocktail reception with 2 of my roommates: Jessica Emory & Keren Yohannes.

I think
I can speak for all forty of us when I say that the conference helped us talk
about our experiences in a way we hadn’t really wanted to (or knew how to) before. We were surrounded by people who not only understood the last year, but
had lived it. Conversation topics ranged from digestive problems and bodily
fluids to romance to language slips to serendipity, to the guilt that a lot of
us were carrying. Guilt that comes from being a person of privilege meeting and
living with people without many of the same privileges, and
guilt that arises in our own country as we realize we had this $25,000
experience for our own personal development, and aren’t quite sure what to do
with this gift.

After the conference...a group of us killing time at the Appleton airport. What a joy it was to travel WITH people.

One of the things we gained from
the conference (besides great conversation, shirts and water bottles), was a
little red book with each of our photos and project descriptions. At the front,
the foundation writes about the Watson as a year of “transformational exposure, intellectual entrepreneurship and
experiential learning that contributes deeply to their [fellows] becoming more
humane and effective participants in the world community.”

We talked
a lot about what this means and how we’ll all arrive at our own, individual,
and often ambiguous answers.People are
always somewhat shocked when I tell them there is no pressure to “produce”
anything from the Watson; but in some ways, I wonder if the lack of this
requirement makes us more thoughtful about defining one for ourselves. This might mean writing more about our research,
looking for jobs with international aid organizations, or just living more
thoughtful, examined lives in the U.S. I
know even if I do nothing further with this name research, my Watson
experiences are going to profoundly shape how I see the world for the rest of
my life. I will be a different kind of thinker, a different kind of writer, a
different kind of daughter, a different kind of parent, all because of the
journey I was lucky enough to take.

Reunited with my beloved friend, Hadley, who came to visit me on PEI. She is a person who understands me like no other, and who is about to take a year-long journey to Amman, Jordan. I can only hope I can be as transcontinentally supportive, loving, and hilarious for her as she was for me. I am so excited for what lies ahead. (But in the future let's work on being in the same country at the same time).

I’m
still working on coming to terms with the past year, with what a gift it was,
with how I will somehow merge who I am at home with who I was over the last
twelve months. I’ll be home in Vermont with my parents over the coming weeks
(months?) going over these questions and making lots of trips to see the people
I’ve loved and missed. I’m taking it one step at a time. I have a final report
due to the foundation in a few weeks that I’ll share with you then. I’m sure it will
be full of more reflections and conclusions than I’m capable of making right
now (I have, after all, only been back for 2 weeks—a good chunk of which has
been spent at the returning fellows conference and, now, in Prince Edward
Island, Canada…) Here is what I do know, some broken down pieces of a
monumental year:

Watson By Numbers:

Days spent outside of the United States: 365

Blog posts: 163 (this makes 164)

Project country where I spent the most money on food:
Ireland

Project country where I spent the least money on food: India

Visits to the hospital: 1

Broken kindles: 2

Broken cameras: 1

Packages of stuff mailed home: 7

Items Stolen: 0

Number of Project Countries: 7 (8 if we count Northern
Ireland as the United Kingdom)

Longest Time in a Project Country: 55 days (Tie between India and
Morocco)

Shortest Time in a Project Country: 35 days (Germany...if I count Ireland and Northern Ireland as the same country).

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

It feels strange, but good. I've forgotten certain things. I wandered around our kitchen for ten minutes this morning trying to remember where the toaster was. I did a sink full of dishes by hand before being reminded we have a dishwasher. I text like someone many decades older than I am. My closet feels overwhelming.

As the mom of a dear friend said to me the other evening,
"there is no in between." You're either there, or you're here. I
went from being so on my own, on a long year in places so far, to being completely and utterly home. You're either away or you're not. There is no in between.

Downtown Burlington

I was worried everything would feel the same when I got back, and that this would bother me because I wanted more tangible proof that this year happened. But I'm finding that actually everything feels really different, even just the way I move about these familiar spaces.

It's been a nice few days. Driving around Vermont with my Dad, satisfying culinary cravings at farmers' markets and berry farms, painstakingly unpacking boxes I had sent home throughout the year, folding old clothes from high school and driving them to Goodwill.

I hadn't realized until now, being home and in a different mode, just how much energy the whole Watson persona took. Even when there were moments I felt comfortable and relaxed, you can't "turn off" in the same way when you're traveling solo and responsible for everything. I hadn't fully realized what a different norm that was. Merging these different ways of being in the world is my new challenge.

I'm in Burlington all too briefly. Early Thursday morning I fly out again, this time to Wisconsin, for the returning fellows conference. I'll get to meet the 39 other Watson fellows who have had their own journeys and experiences and adventures. I'll be back on Sunday and then early Monday morning, I'll head up to Prince Edward Island, Canada to join the rest of my family (and my beloved friend Hadley) in our traditional summer setting.

I'm not quite sure about the fate of this blog, but I will say that (for your sake, and mostly for mine), I'm not going to quit cold turkey. I'll let you know how the conference goes and how settling back in here feels, but posts will be more sporadic.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Come to think of it, “big” might be
the best word to use when people ask me how my year was.

Geographically.
Emotionally. Calendrically.

I have
less than 48 hours left in Reykjavik and less than 48 hours left of being “on
my Watson year.”

The
joyous return I was already envisioning from a porch in Bali twelve months ago
feels a bit more complicated. Don’t get me wrong, I’m so excited to go home
that most nights I can’t sleep, but as it comes closer and closer to being a
reality, I also have been realizing more and more that going home will also
be a loss.

Processing this ending has also
been made more complicated as I try to mourn another loss. I’ve been having
conversations with my parents over the last year about the health of our
beloved family dog, Cally, and the end is, unfortunately, quite near. They were hoping she would hold out until I
was home so that I could see her one last time, but we’ve all decided that she’s
in a lot of pain, and it makes the most sense to let her go before then.

I wasn’t sure whether to write
about this turn of events on here or not. I don’t generally advocate for
grieving through forms of social media (“RIPs” on Facebook statuses
somehow diminish the sentiment, no matter how well-intentioned they are), but this is the way I’m able to talk to
people this year. I wanted to let you know that this is the reason my countdown
to home has become a bit more thorny.

In a kind of cruel irony,
Cally is going to be put to sleep on Friday, probably some time while I’m flying over the Atlantic Ocean. My countdown to home has also become a countdown to
losing her.

The Watson Foundation has a rule
about us not returning to the United States. They even specify that the only reason they’d
make an exception would be the death of a parent or a sibling. The rule seems
irrational and ridiculously harsh, but I think I’ve begun to understand it more
as I go along. I took it into consideration when I first decided to accept. I
worried that something big and terrible would happen at home while I was
abroad. I hadn’t thought about my dog.

Talking
about the loss of a pet is a difficult thing. We don’t really have the language
to do so. I’ve been in places this year where people would have laughed if they
had seen how upset I was about the death of a dog. We don’t have the language
for grieving over animals; we want to acknowledge a loss while simultaneously acknowledging
that there are bigger losses people face.

It
reminds me of when we first got Cally. My sister and I would melodramatically
cling to her, proclaiming our love as if she understood us, and felt welcomed
into the family through words alone. I remember countless conversations with my
Dad where we tried to get him to say that he loved Cally. He would say
something along the lines of being fond of her, or that she was a great dog,
but there was a difference between the way he cared for Cally and the way he
cared for us. We would listen patiently but then wail, “But why don’t you love
her?”

We
wanted absolutes. We didn’t understand that there can be different kinds of
love, that she could be a part of our family even if we loved her in different
ways than we loved each other.

She has
been a part of our family for the last fourteen years. She joined a home that
was then the home of two girls, ages eight and eleven, who opened up a box on
Christmas morning to find dog food and a leash and put together the pieces,
hysterical with joy. She had been
painstakingly waited for, counted down for, loved before she even arrived. I remember training her on snowy mornings, a
clumsy ball of fur with black paws skidding on our kitchen floor in New York,
small enough to stand on the top of the dishwasher while we were loading it and
lick the plates. I remember being furious at her when she ripped up the pages of
my new American Girl book, terrified when we took her to walk in the woods at
Sugar Pond on a February morning and she slipped through some ice. My Dad put his coat on the ice and laid down on it, stretching out to distribute his weight and pull her out. That’s when we knew he loved her.

She was a great dog. She barked too much and was sometimes snappy
with other dogs. Sometimes she chased cars, even if we’d run after her,
yelling. But she was with us as we grew up, as great dogs should be. She was there for my parents when my sister and I went off to college. She was
gentle with children and obligingly wore a pair of antlers when we’d walk her
every Christmas Eve on Church Street. In periods of high school angst, if I was
upset in my room, and my Mom knew I wouldn’t put up with any kind of
consolation from her, she’d open the door to let Cally in instead. She’d wander
over to my bed and lick the tears off my face. She adored her time on Prince
Edward Island every summer as much as the rest of us, she learned to be a lover of
water, chasing countless sticks and Frisbees through the waves, running on the
beach. She was agile, fast, beautiful.
On Christmas mornings she opened her own presents wrapped up with tissue paper.
She was remarkably good at it. She was
smart.

I can’t remember a time in my life
before my family took walks together almost every evening or afternoon. I’m not
sure if we’ve always been that way, or if it started with Cally. She gave us a
reason to, to escape the house for a while as various combinations of the four
of us would take time out of our separate lives, emerging from different rooms to walk her together. I
hope we still do that.

My mom says that Cally hasn’t been
eating for a while now. She carries her up and down the stairs every day. She asked me if I want to skype with Cally
before Friday, to say goodbye to her, but the idea of skyping with a dog seems ludicrous
and laughable. And maybe I’d rather remember her running on the beach anyway.

I went jogging this morning down by
the water, on what will probably be my last run in Reykjavik. It all hit me for
the first time, because, apparently, when you’re miles away and hearing about a
loss through gchat, it takes a couple days for it to sink in.

I finished my run and began crying,
walked to a nearby park, red-faced and sweaty. People walked by and I tried to
cover in some kind of elaborate stretching routine that would hide my face. I
thought about the day I had ahead, of coffee dates and meals with people who are lovely and generous, but whom I
barely know. I don’t want to talk to them about my dog. I don’t even want to
talk to them about this year. Everything feels too personal, too impossible to
even begin to describe. I don’t want their faces to be the ones at the other end of
these particular conversations.

I’m ready to go home.

I walked back to my apartment, snot
and sweat and tears blurred on my face, put on a smile, and opened the door to
meet three Austrian tourists who had just arrived.

Much as I can try to mentally prepare
myself, I have no way of knowing what it
will actually feel like to be back in the U.S., coming to terms with my own
ending, coming to terms with Cally’s. All I can do is go through the motions. Saying
my goodbyes in Reykjavik cafes. Laundry. Passport. Flight confirmation.
Packing. Then board a plane, take off, and trust that somehow, I’ll figure it
out when I get there.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

I think I just had my last
interview of the year. It’s the last one I have scheduled, anyway, and I want to keep it
that way and hoard these last few days all to myself. I still don’t know what (if anything) is to
come of all of the conversations of this year or of my own relationship to this
research and to this topic. I seem to fluctuate wildly between thinking I should
go home and write a book with all of it immediately, and wanting to shut the
cover of my black notebook and lay it to rest as this year comes to an end.

And it
has. When Katie and Isa were visiting me at the very beginning of my time in
Iceland, we talked about how this topic is impossible to study without talking
to people. You can’t (usually) learn someone’s name through observation alone.
It requires a conversation, and, if the conversation is to be at all
interesting or revealing, it requires a connection. Studying names has given me a reason to talk
to people, and a reason to travel. Even if those were the only reasons for
studying names, they’ve made it a worthwhile topic.

My last few weeks in Iceland have
been filled by a steady flow of these conversations. I’m still working on how they
all fit together, but I also think that in some ways, that’s what the Icelandic
naming committee is currently figuring out too--how these different aspects of
a changing Icelandic population work, where the lines are between cultural
insularity and cultural acceptance, what it means to carry a name that breaks
linguistic and grammatical rules, and if that even matters. I’m breaking down
my recent interviews (the ones I haven't written about yet) into brief descriptions of what I think were their most
interesting moments below. Hopefully
this gives you a sense of the questions that arise in discussing what constitutes
an Icelandic name in 2012.

Outdoor art in downtown Reykjavik

Monument to civil disobedience outside the parliament to commemorate the protests following the 2008 economic crash.

Sara & Olga

Sara &
Olga are two sisters who live out in Hafnarfjarðar. I met with them a few weeks ago
and they kindly gave me breakfast and some pretty adorable babies to hold (it
was all in all a great morning). They have three daughters between them and we
talked about how they chose their names.

Sara’s daughter, Rafnhildur
Sjorn, is six weeks old. She was going to be called “Marta” or “Isabella” until
Sara took a look at her jet black hair and fierce, determined eyes. Rafnhildur
is an old Valkyriename that comes from the words “raven” and “battle.”
The name “Sjorn” is Sara’s mother’s name.

Olga has two daughters, four
year-old Úlfhildur Sjorn (the
Sjorn again after her mother, and Úlfhildur meaning “battle of the wolves”),
and one year-old Salvor Vega (Salvor meaning “sun season”). She told me it’s
taken her a while to decide on both of her daughters’ names. (Úlfhildur wasn’t
named until she was six weeks old). She
felt it was a great responsibility, she told me. She said that she kept
wondering, if “a baby makes a name, or a name makes a baby.”

Sara and Olga spent a large part
of their childhoods in Sweden, and they said that at times their Icelandic names
posed challenges. Like in most Icelandic
families, their names followed the patronymic system, which meant they all had
different last names. In Sweden, their whole family decided to go by their
father’s last name to make things less complicated. Olga also told me that in
school she was self-conscious about being the only girl with her first name. “I
really hated it,” she told me. “But then I started realizing that teachers
always remembered it. I was the only Olga, and I got to make up what that name
meant.”

We talked a bit about the patronymic
system and how it worked. It struck me for the first time that Iceland was a
place where, if you took your mother’s name, it was quite obvious. In the states, if you go by your mother’s last
name instead of your father’s, it can easily go unnoticed (“Smith” and “Garcia”,
for example, are genderless, and could have come from either parent). In
Iceland, however, since surnames are derived from first names, and first names
are regulated by gender, a baby named with the last name “Helgasdottir” as opposed
to “Jonssdottir” would clearly be going by her mother’s name. There may be some
stigmas surrounding this (stigmas that are starting to change as more and more
people are opting to use the matrynomic). Traditionally, however, having your mother’s
last name could be an indication either that you have a radical feminist for a
mother, or, to the delight of the gossiping Icelandic countryside, the father’s
identity is unclear.

I recently heard a story that during
World War II when there were many American and British soldiers in Iceland, many
babies were being born to Icelandic women with the last name “Hermatthson” or “Hermathsdottir.”
In Icelandic, “hermaður“ is the
word for soldier, so these invented surnames conveinently left the identity of
their non-Icelandic fathers unknown.

We got on this topic because
Sara is raising Rafnhildur Sjorn on her own. Her full name is Rafnhildur
Sjorn Sarasdottir. We wondered whether
Rafnhildur would face people making assumptions about her based on her surname,
or whether by the time she’s going to school, it will be more commonplace.

Sara and Olga are fiercely
against the regulations on names in Iceland. They think they’re arbitrary and feel that
often the reasons behind the naming committee’s decisions are vague and
illogical.

“A society is only a living society
if it is willing to change,” Sara told me. She foresees many changes in Iceland’s
near future.

Maria

I’ve already
written a bit about my conversation with Maria, a Columbian woman who has been
living in Iceland for the last twenty-two years. I wrote about her parents emigrating from Columbia to Iceland to join her, and about the pumpkin
soup and sunshine in her backyard on a Monday afternoon.

She told me about choosing names for her three
Icelandic-Columbian children that would work in both places (Michael Luis, Sara
Isabel, and Gabriel). Her Icelandic
husband had many traditions in his family about passing on names, but he
insisted that they break them. “He wanted the kids names to show that they
weren’t only Icelandic,” she told me. “He wants them to be proud of all parts
of themselves.”

One experience that was
particularly interesting to her as an outsider was following the Icelandic tradition
of not revealing the baby’s name until the baptism. “I didn’t get it at first,”
she told me. “I didn’t see what the big deal was.” She told me that in
Columbia, the baby is usually named in utero, spoken to by that name, planned
for. It seemed so strange to her to wait for months after the baby’s birth to
reveal the name. “But I loved it.” She told me. “I did it with all my kids. It
was such a fun surprise. Everyone was just so happy, and that way, no one can
say they don’t like the name. When the priest says it, it’s there.”

Like Lani, Maria arrived in Iceland
before the law changed that forced immigrants to choose Icelandic names for
themselves in order to gain citizenship. Unlike Lani, she was one of the lucky
ones. “Maria” worked perfectly in the Icelandic language and is on the approved
list of names. “Maria” could cross cultures.

Maria knows lots of people who
decided not to get citizenship in Iceland before the law changed. She has a
friend from Bolivia, for example, who only recently got citizenship after
twenty-eight years in the country. Before the law changed, he would just
continually get his visa renewed, rather than change his name.

She told me about one time when she
was in line at a government office watching a Vietnamese women in front of
her. The Vietnamese woman was asked her name and told the official at the desk,
“one second, I have to look it up.” She started shuffling through her purse,
and Maria realized she must have adopted an Icelandic name formally, but had to
look it up to remember what it actually was. It was an identity that existed on
paper alone.

Maria thinks the regulations about
names have gotten more and more flexible each year that she’s been here. She
has started an organization for families who are new to Iceland, and she always
finds it interesting what choices they make in terms of changing or keeping
their names. Many of their Icelandic-born children’s names are approved, names Maria
thinks would never have been approved when she first arrived.

“More Icelanders are traveling and
that makes them think,” she told me. “They realize that they can travel around
the world with their Icelandic name and people will call them by it. It doesn’t
make sense that they wouldn’t do the same for foreigners coming to Iceland.”

Tryggvi

On
the drive to Thingvellir National Park last week, I interviewed Tryggvi, my
landlady’s partner and the namesake of his grandfather, a former prime minister
of Iceland. He passed on the Icelandic tradition of choosing names for your
kids after your grandparents. His three children are called Hildur Jacobina, Guðrún
Lillja, andAgnar Björn, all names from his family or
his ex-wife’s family.

The
Icelandic tradition of naming your children after your grandparents was so
popular in his family that he has five cousins who are named Tryggvi as well. We talked about this tradition and how Tryggvi
thinks that when he was growing up in Iceland, families were more like clans.
The names indicated who was related to who, and how they were related, and
everyone knew what family was known for what. Traditionally in Iceland, these names became
important for questions of inheritance and marriage and family relationships. “Icelandic
families had their own little mafia,” he joked.

I’m starting to get a handle on
just how small the population of Iceland is. Its one thing to know the number,
and it’s another to be here and see how people operate in a place where everyone
is so inter-connected. I realized today for the first time that the population
of the state of Vermont is double that of Iceland.

Tryggvi
told me that the tradition of passing on names from within your family is dying
out a bit, something that he thinks is quite sad. He thinks that more people
are traveling and coming back to Iceland, and choosing not to use names from their
families for their own children. He
believes names should continue to be regulated here. He doesn’t want all of
these traditions to die out.

I tend to be skeptical about the
Icelandic name regulations, but I sympathized with Tryggvi on the rainy drive.
At the heart of it all is the importance of a sense of belonging and of
community, of a big Icelandic family. There’s a sadness that comes from
realizing maybe today people are less interested in where they came from, more
interested in where they are going.

Auður Eir

My last interview was with Auður
Eir, who happens to be Iceland’s first female priest. She’s somewhat of a
celebrity here, but it’s a small country, and it turned out she knew
Steingurther, who put us in touch. Auður kindly picked me up at my apartment on
her way to work and we went to the “Kvenna Kirkjan” ("Women’s Church"), that she runs downtown. She talked to me about her four daughters’
names: Dalla, Yrsa, Elin Þöll, and Þjóðhildur. Dalla was chosen because it’s Auður’s
mother's name and the name of the wife of the first Icelandic Lutheran Bishop.
Yrsa is named after her sister, Þöll is the name for a small tree, and Auður thought it was very pretty combined with Elin. By the time Þjóðhildur came
around, her oldest daughter, Dalla, was reading Icelandic history in school. She wanted
to name her new baby sister Þjóðhildur after Leif Eriksson’s mother. Auður told
her, “that is such a big name for such a little girl,” but now, she loves it. She thinks Þjóðhildur has grown into her name.

For Auður, the naming committee is
a gift. She told me that before it formed, she had to act as an informal
committee herself.

“Before, I had to be the one to tell parents
yes or no about whether they could have a name. I had to read the law and
decide whether I could baptize a baby with that name or not.” She was ordained in 1974, 17 years before the foundation
of the naming committee. “It was really
hard to face the parents and tell them I couldn’t baptize the baby with that
name, but it was my responsibility as an official.”

A few times, if she refused, the
parents decided to go to another priest instead (some of them tended to be more
flexible than others). She told me that in a few heartbreaking cases, she had
been baptizing babies in a family for years, but then when someone came to her
with a name she thought didn’t meet the standards, she had to refuse them.
There have been three cases that she remembers where this happened and the
family stopped speaking to her. She remembers every one.

The committee makes her job easier.
There is a higher authority that approves or rejects a name, and she can turn
to them to ask whether a name will go through—it is not up to her interpretation
of the law alone. But when I asked Auður
about if she thought names here should be regulated, she wasn’t sure. She thinks it’s important for names to work
properly in the Icelandic language, and to preserve a kind of cultural
identity, but she wonders if perhaps, people would self-regulate. She wonders
if the rules should be there or if, as she put it, they could just “let it be.”
She thinks that right now more international sounding names are popular, but
she thinks these trends move in a circular fashion. She thinks that maybe as
people become more global citizens, they might actually choose more Icelandic
names for future generations. It might
happen on its own.

Auður confessed to me that baptisms
are her favorite. “Weddings and confirmations are nice too,” she told me. “But
baptisms are smaller. You can be with the whole family, talking, singing hymns.
And then of course, there’s cake and coffee.” She told me that she loves
hearing names, of seeing the happiness in families as they learn what their
newest member will be called. “You hear your name so many times a day,” she
told me. “People need to love their name.”

These conversations all happened individually, in different
contexts; a woman’s church, apartment buildings, a car ride. Most of these
people do not know each other, but their words may be most interesting when put
in dialogue with each other, like most of the conversations I’ve had this year. These names have become part of an Icelandic cultural
landscape, and the onomastic landscape that this year has been to me.

I don’t think this will be the last
time I write something about names. I might try to write some more overarching,
cross-cultural posts when I get home about what I’ve learned about names this
year in general.

Or maybe not.

It’s the last name post for now. I’m so grateful I had a reason to meet these
people, people who have now defined who a Tryggvi or an Auður is, who
have showed me the ways a Maria can cross borders, how a Sara and an Olga think
and behave, how we all somehow ended up in this place, introducing ourselves to
each other by name, and all that they encompass.

About Me

I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2011 as an English Literature/Theater Major. From July 2011 to July 2012 I'll be traveling to seven different countries on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study naming practices around the world (www.watsonfellowship.org). You can reach me at nell.a.bangjensen@gmail.com.